by Paula Guran
“I have lived among you for twenty-four years. I don’t see a face here that I haven’t spent pleasurable time with. I have fought for the right, when all of you have fought for inertia. I led the fight against the city council when they wanted to take away our parks, I have fought for every cause that furthers human freedom. And tonight if your pitiful fire were to take me before God’s great judgment seat, I would look Him right in the eye and say, ‘Non Serviam—I will not serve!’ Now watch!”
She said a magical word and she flew about twenty feet into the sky. Then she returned.
“See? I can escape. But I won’t. I have other battles to fight, and bigger battlefields to fight on. Go ahead, put me to the torch. Remember the night you burned your village’s freedom fighter.”
For awhile they were afraid of her, but their dull-eyed anger flared and they put the fire beneath her.
She died screaming at first, then suddenly she seemed to be gone from the flames—at least some said so, quietly, years later.
The fire went out and a great cloud of ash blew up and it got in the townsfolk hair, or stained their foreheads, or their hands and arms. Some were stained on their cheeks and others their lips or teeth. They found that when they went home, they couldn’t scrub it off.
They all stayed in the next day, scrubbing their flesh, bleaching their hair, or polishing their teeth. They washed and they remembered her screams and they remembered the good she had done and they washed. And they washed.
Then the next day they took to avoiding one another on the streets. It was a little embarrassing to meet people in daylight after the burning. There was a run on scarves, big hats, and trench coats. The motel was genuinely full of one half of the town’s married couples, who found the idea of looking at (or being looked at by) the stained spouse too painful.
The tattoo parlor did a lively business afterwards, but the ash stain would show up through the new tattoo after about a month.
They moved away from the town after that, hiding themselves in big cities and going out only at night in scarves and hats and long coats.
You may have seen one of them in your city. They will occasionally look up and see a bit of ash floating in the air—maybe from a wholesome suburban chimney—maybe from a fire that the homeless have made in a barrel. They’ll be looking at the ash, like a feather from a black angel’s wing, and they’ll run.
Sometimes they scream.
Ursula K. Le Guin is now a living legend. But before the Earthsea Trilogy, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, the awards and the honors . . . it all started with her first published story—this 1962 tale that combines time travel, Paris, the quest for knowledge, and a male practitioner of magic. It’s also the only story in this collection with a man who might be termed a witch.
The etymology of the word witch in English is rather complicated (and, for some, controversial), but the word seems to have originally applied to both men and women. By 1601, however, terms like men-witches or he-witch were being used, so witch was taking on a primarily feminine meaning. In modern English, wizard (originally meaning “philosopher, sage” with the “magical power” connotation beginning around 1550) and warlock (the base word wærloga primarily meant “oath-breaker”; the “-ck” ending a “male witch” meaning emerging from Scottish in the 1560s) are now commonly used for “male witch” in fiction and film.
April in Paris
Ursula K. Le Guin
Professor Barry Pennywither sat in a cold, shadowy garret and stared at the table in front of him, on which lay a book and a breadcrust. The bread had been his dinner, the book had been his lifework. Both were dry. Dr. Pennywither sighed, and then shivered. Though the lower-floor apartments of the old house were quite elegant, the heat was turned off on April 1st, come what may; it was now April second, and sleeting. If Dr. Pennywither raised his head a little he could see from his window the two square towers of Notre Dame de Paris, vague and soaring in the dusk, almost near enough to touch: for the Island of Saint-Louis, where he lived, is like a little barge being towed downstream behind the Island of the City, where Notre Dame stands. But he did not raise his head. He was too cold.
The great towers sank into darkness. Dr. Pennywither sank into gloom. He stared with loathing at his book. It had won him a year in Paris—publish or perish, said the Dean of Faculties, and he had published, and been rewarded with a year’s leave from teaching, without pay. Munson College could not afford to pay unteaching teachers. So on his scraped-up savings he had come back to Paris, to live again as a student in a garret, to read fifteenth-century manuscripts at the Library, to see the chestnuts flower along the avenues. But it hadn’t worked. He was forty, too old for lonely garrets. The sleet would blight the budding chestnut flowers. And he was sick of his work. Who cared about his theory, the Pennywither Theory, concerning the mysterious disappearance of the poet François Villon in 1463? Nobody. For after all his Theory about poor Villon, the greatest juvenile delinquent of all time, was only a theory and could never be proved, not across the gulf of five hundred years. Nothing could be proved. And besides, what did it matter if Villon died on Montfaucon gallows or (as Pennywither thought) in a Lyons brothel on the way to Italy? Nobody cared. Nobody else loved Villon enough. Nobody loved Dr. Pennywither, either; not even Dr. Pennywither. Why should he? An unsocial, unmarried, underpaid pedant, sitting here alone in an unheated attic in an unrestored tenement trying to write another unreadable book. “I’m unrealistic,” he said aloud with another sigh and another shiver. He got up and took the blanket off his bed, wrapped himself in it, sat down thus bundled at the table, and tried to light a Gauloise Bleue. His lighter snapped vainly. He sighed once more, got up, fetched a can of vile-smelling French lighter fluid, sat down, rewrapped his cocoon, filled the lighter, and snapped it. The fluid had spilled around a good bit. The lighter lit, so did Dr. Pennywither, from the wrists down. “Oh hell!” he cried, blue flames leaping from his knuckles, and jumped up batting his arms wildly, shouting “Hell!” and raging against Destiny. Nothing ever went right. What was the use? It was then 8:12 on the night of April 2nd, 1961.
A man sat hunched at a table in a cold, high room. Through the window behind him the two square towers of Notre Dame loomed in the spring dusk. In front of him on the table lay a hunk of cheese and a huge, iron-latched, handwritten book. The book was called (in Latin) On the Primacy of the Element Fire over the Other Three Elements. Its author stared at it with loathing. Nearby on a small iron stove a small alembic simmered. Jehan Lenoir mechanically inched his chair nearer the stove now and then, for warmth, but his thoughts were on deeper problems. “Hell!” he said finally (in Late Mediaeval French), slammed the book shut, and got up. What if his theory was wrong? What if water were the primal element? How could you prove these things? There must he some way—some method—so that one could be sure, absolutely sure, of one single fact! But each fact led into others, a monstrous tangle, and the Authorities conflicted, and anyway no one would read his book, not even the wretched pedants at the Sorbonne. They smelled heresy. What was the use? What good this life spent in poverty and alone, when he had learned nothing, merely guessed and theorized? He strode about the garret, raging, and then stood still. “All right!” he said to Destiny. “Very good! You’ve given me nothing, so I’ll take what I want!” He went to one of the stacks of books that covered most of the floor-space, yanked out a bottom volume (scarring the leather and bruising his knuckles when the overlying folios avalanched), slapped it on the table and began to study one page of it. Then, still with a set cold look of rebellion, he got things ready: sulfur, silver, chalk. . . . Though the room was dusty and littered, his little workbench was neatly and handily arranged. He was soon ready. Then he paused. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered, glancing out the window into the darkness where now one could only guess at the two square towers. A watchman passed below calling out the hour, eight o’clock of a cold clear night. It was so still he could hear the lapping of the Seine. He
shrugged, frowned, took up the chalk and drew a neat pentagram on the floor near his table, then took up the book and began to read in a clear but self-conscious voice: “Haere, haere, audi me . . . ” It was a long spell, and mostly nonsense. His voice sank. He stood bored and embarrassed. He hurried through the last words, shut the book, and then fell backwards against the door, gap-mouthed, staring at the enormous, shapeless figure that stood within the pentagram, lit only by the blue flicker of its waving, fiery claws.
Barry Pennywither finally got control of himself and put out the fire by burying his hands in the folds of the blanket wrapped around him. Unburned but upset, he sat down again. He looked at his book. Then he stared at it. It was no longer thin and gray and titled The Last Years of Villon: An Investigation of Possibilities. It was thick and brown and titled Incantatoria Magna. On his table? A priceless manuscript dating from 1407 of which the only extant undamaged copy was in the Ambrosian Library in Milan? He looked slowly around. His mouth dropped slowly open. He observed a stove, a chemist’s workbench, two or three dozen heaps of unbelievable leatherbound books, the window, the door. His window, his door. But crouching against his door was a little creature, black and shapeless, from which came a dry rattling sound.
Barry Pennywither was not a very brave man, but he was rational. He thought he had lost his mind, and so he said quite steadily, “Are you the Devil?”
The creature shuddered and rattled.
Experimentally, with a glance at invisible Notre Dame, the professor made the sign of the Cross.
At this the creature twitched; not a flinch, a twitch. Then it said something, feebly, but in perfectly good English—no, in perfectly good French—no, in rather odd French: “Mais vous estes de Dieu,” it said.
Barry got up and peered at it. “Who are you?” he demanded, and it lifted up a quite human face and answered meekly, “Jehan Lenoir.”
“What are you doing in my room?”
There was a pause. Lenoir got up from his knees and stood straight, all five foot two of him. “This is my room,” he said at last, though very politely.
Barry looked around at the books and alembics. There was another pause. “Then how did I get here?”
“I brought you.”
“Are you a doctor?”
Lenoir nodded, with pride. His whole air had changed. “Yes, I’m a doctor,” he said. “Yes, I brought you here. If Nature will yield me no knowledge, then I can conquer Nature herself, I can work a miracle! To the Devil with science, then. I was a scientist—” he glared at Barry. “No longer! They call me a fool, a heretic, well by God I’m worse! I’m a sorcerer, a black magician, Jehan the Black! Magic works, does it? Then science is a waste of time. Ha!” he said, but he did not really look triumphant. “I wish it hadn’t worked,” he said more quietly, pacing up and down between folios.
“So do I,” said the guest.
“Who are you?” Lenoir looked up challengingly at Barry, though there was nearly a foot difference in their heights.
“Barry A. Pennywither. I’m a professor of French at Munson College, Indiana, on leave in Paris to pursue my studies of Late Mediaeval Fr—” He stopped. He had just realized what kind of accent Lenoir had. “What year is this? What century? Please, Dr. Lenoir—” The Frenchman looked confused. The meanings of words change, as well as their pronunciations. “Who rules this country?” Barry shouted.
Lenoir gave a shrug, a French shrug (some things never change), “Louis is king,” he said. “Louis the Eleventh. The dirty old spider.”
They stood staring at each other like wooden Indians for some time. Lenoir spoke first. “Then you’re a man?”
“Yes. Look, Lenoir, I think you—your spell—you must have muffed it a bit.”
“Evidently,” said the alchemist. “Are you French?”
“No.”
“Are you English?” Lenoir glared. “Are you a filthy Goddam?”
“No. No. I’m from America. I’m from the—from your future. From the twentieth century AD.” Barry blushed. It sounded silly, and he was a modest man. But he knew this was no illusion. The room he stood in, his room, was new. Not five centuries old. Unswept, but new. And the copy of Albertus Magnus by his knee was new, bound in soft supple calfskin, the gold lettering gleaming. And there stood Lenoir in his black gown, not in costume, at home . . .
“Please sit down, sir,” Lenoir was saying. And he added, with the fine though absent courtesy of the poor scholar, “Are you tired from the journey? I have bread and cheese, if you’ll honor me by sharing it.”
They sat at the table munching bread and cheese. At first Lenoir tried to explain why he had tried black magic. “I was fed up,” he said. “Fed up! I’ve slaved in solitude since I was twenty, for what? For knowledge. To learn some of Nature’s secrets. They are not to be learned.” He drove his knife half an inch into the table, and Barry jumped. Lenoir was a thin little fellow, but evidently a passionate one. It was a fine face, though pale and lean: intelligent, alert, vivid. Barry was reminded of the face of a famous atomic physicist, seen in newspaper pictures up until 1953. Somehow this likeness prompted him to say, “Some are, Lenoir; we’ve learned a good bit, here and there . . . ”
“What?” said the alchemist, skeptical but curious.
“Well, I’m no scientist—”
“Can you make gold?” He grinned as he asked.
“No, I don’t think so, but they do make diamonds.”
“How?”
“Carbon-coal, you know—under great heat and pressure, I believe. Coal and diamond are both carbon, you know, the same element.”
“Element?”
“Now as I say, I’m no—”
“Which is the primal element?” Lenoir shouted, his eyes fiery, the knife poised in his hand.
“There are about a hundred elements,” Barry said coldly, hiding his alarm.
Two hours later, having squeezed out of Barry every dribble of the remnants of his college chemistry course, Lenoir rushed out into the night and reappeared shortly with a bottle. “O my master,” he cried, “to think I offered you only bread and cheese!” It was a pleasant burgundy, vintage 1477, a good year. After they had drunk a glass together Lenoir said, “If somehow 1 could repay you . . . ”
“You can. Do you know the name of the poet François Villon?”
“Yes,” Lenoir said with some surprise, “but he wrote only French trash, you know, not in Latin.”
“Do you know how or when he died?”
“Oh, yes; hanged at Montfaucon here in ’64 or ’65, with a crew of no-goods like himself. Why?”
Two hours later the bottle was dry, their throats were dry, and the watchman had called three o’clock of a cold clear morning. “Jehan, I’m worn out,” Barry said, “you’d better send me back.” The alchemist was too polite, too grateful, and perhaps also too tired to argue. Barry stood stiffly inside the pentagram, a tall bony figure muffled in a brown blanket, smoking a Gauloise Bleue. “Adieu,” Lenoir said sadly. “Au revoir,” Barry replied. Lenoir began to read the spell backwards. The candle flickered, his voice softened. “Me audi, haere, haere,” he read, sighed, and looked up. The pentagram was empty. The candle flickered. “But I learned so little!” Lenoir cried out to the empty room. Then he beat the open book with his fists and said, “And a friend like that—a real friend—” He smoked one of the cigarettes Barry had left him—he had taken to tobacco at once. He slept, sitting at his table, for a couple of hours. When he woke he brooded a while, relit his candle, smoked the other cigarette, then opened the Incantatoria and began to read aloud: “Haere, haere . . . ”
“Oh, thank God,” Barry said, stepping quickly out of the pentagram and grasping Lenoir’s hand. “Listen, I got back there—this room, this same room, Jehan! but old, horribly old, and empty, you weren’t there—I thought, my God, what have I done? I’d sell my soul to get back there, to him—What can I do with what I’ve learned? Who’ll believe it? How can I prove it? And who the Devil could I tell it
to anyhow? Who cares? I couldn’t sleep, I sat and cried for an hour—”
“Will you stay?”
“Yes. Look, I brought these—in case you did invoke me.” Sheepishly he exhibited eight packs of Gauloises, several books, and a gold watch. “It might fetch a price,” he explained. “I knew paper francs wouldn’t do much good.”
At sight of the printed books Lenoir’s eyes gleamed with curiosity, but he stood still. “My friend,” he said, “you said you’d sell your soul . . . you know . . . so would I. Yet we haven’t. How—after all—how did this happen? That we’re both men. No devils. No pacts in blood. Two men who’ve lived in this room . . . ”
“I don’t know,” said Barry. “We’ll think that out later. Can I stay with you, Jehan?”
“Consider this your home,” Lenoir said with a gracious gesture around the room, the stacks of books, the alembics, the candle growing pale. Outside the window, gray on gray, rose up the two great towers of Notre Dame. It was the dawn of April 3rd.
After breakfast (bread crusts and cheese rinds) they went out and climbed the south tower. The cathedral looked the same as always, though cleaner than in 1961, but the view was rather a shock to Barry. He looked down upon a little town. Two small islands covered with houses; on the right bank more houses crowded inside a fortified wall; on the left bank a few streets twisting around the college; and that was all. Pigeons chortled on the sun-warmed stone between gargoyles. Lenoir, who had seen the view before, was carving the date (in Roman numerals) on a parapet. “Let’s celebrate,” he said. “Let’s go out into the country. I haven’t been out of the city for two years. Let’s go clear over there—” he pointed to a misty green hill on which a few huts and a windmill were just visible—“to Montmartre, eh? There are some good bars there, I’m told.”
Their life soon settled into an easy routine. At first Barry was a little nervous in the crowded streets, but, in a spare black gown of Lenoir’s, he was not noticed as outlandish except for his height. He was probably the tallest man in fifteenth-century France. Living standards were low and lice were unavoidable, but Barry had never valued comfort much; the only thing he really missed was coffee at breakfast. When they had bought a bed and a razor—Barry had forgotten his—Lenoir introduced him to the landlord as M. Barrie, a cousin of Lenoir’s from the Auvergne, their housekeeping arrangements were complete. Barry’s watch brought a tremendous price, four gold pieces, enough to live on for a year. They sold it as a wondrous new timepiece from Illyria, and the buyer, a Court chamberlain looking for a nice present to give the king, looked at the inscription—Hamilton Bros., New Haven, 1881—and nodded sagely. Unfortunately he was shut up in one of King Louis’s cages for naughty courtiers at Tours before he had presented his gift, and the watch may still be there behind some brick in the ruins of Plessis; but this did not affect the two scholars. Mornings they wandered about sightseeing the Bastille and the churches, or visiting various minor poets in whom Barry was interested; after lunch they discussed electricity, atomic theory, physiology, and other matters in which Lenoir was interested, and performed minor chemical and anatomical experiments, usually unsuccessfully; after supper they merely talked. Endless, easy talks that ranged over the centuries but always ended here, in the shadowy room with its window open to the spring night, in their friendship. After two weeks they might have known each other all their lives. They were perfectly happy. They knew they would do nothing with what they had learned from each other. In 1961 how could Barry ever prove his knowledge of old Paris, in 1482 how could Lenoir ever prove the validity of the scientific method? It did not bother them. They had never really expected to be listened to. They had merely wanted to learn.